so soon retracted, had been nothing but a mockery; a mockery like his crown -- like his scepter -- like his friends -- like all that had surrounded his royal childhood, and which had abandoned his proscribed youth.

NOT long ago, the writer of these lines, In the mad pride of intellectuality, Maintained "the power of words"--denied that ever A thought arose within the human brain Beyond the utterance of the human tongue: And now, as if in mockery of that boast, Two words-two foreign soft dissyllables-- Italian tones, made only to be murmured By angels dreaming in the moonlit "dew That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,"-- Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart, Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought, Richer, far wider, far diviner visions Than even the seraph harper, Israfel,(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures") Could hope to utter.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion to the mockery of events at home.

He looked at the pile of letters waiting for him upon his desk, little square envelopes many of them, but all telling the same tale, all tributes to his great success, and the mockery of it all smote hard upon the walls of his fortitude.

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